Sogut, Cumakizlik

Went there
What I liked
What I didn’t like
How I could have improved things

I recently finished watching it
I liked the premise of ussr vs USA in space – but they didn’t follow through with it
Story felt weak after the time jump and became like fist of the North Star
Doubt it would be remade but would love to see it remade, feel like it would have done better if it had not been cancelled
The ending felt like it was feud ex machina — the whole thing with a ruin distorting space between Grados and Earth. It would have been better if humans had figured it out as well
Not sure if the whole connection of humans and Gradosians was a good idea, felt like it wasn’t fully explained IMHO
How I would fix this series.
The sister and her husband to be should have been developed slightly differently.

Although I got to play around with Windows 8 in a pre-release form on PC last year this was the first time I got to play around with the finished product. I came away impressed with quite a few things, especially the design of Windows 8′s tile-based interface, previously known as Metro – for lack of a better this is the name I’ll use to refer to the tile-based interface of Windows 8.

The tile interface is fairly easy to navigate and each application is represented by tiles of different sizes. Apps that are built for Metro tend to have a simplistic, sharper icon whereas desktop apps simply have the default icon for the application and a smaller sized tile.

Depending on which type of app you launch you will be presented with a different interface. If I launch Google Chrome, which is a desktop mode app, then the classic Windows desktop mode will be launched. On the other hand if I launch the Metro-style Twitter app then it will launch as a full screen app while in Metro-style mode.

Windows 8 comes with a familar slew apps that are common to most OSes – Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Music, Weather, News, Store and Skydrive (Microsoft’s cloud service similar to Dropbox), what sets these apps apart from the usual is that they are Metro-style apps which show live updates in their tiles.

There are 2 particular new apps that I found pretty neat – Messaging and People. Both these apps allow you to connect to your social networks so you can interact with your friends on Twitter or Facebook and like the other Metro-style apps (Weather, News, Finance) updates are displayed on the tile itself.

The other neat addition to Windows 8 is the Windows Store, a digital store from which you can buy Metro-style apps such as Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Twitter and Skype. The Windows Store is still growing, so far it has 50,000 apps to choose from, that’s five times the amount of available apps on the Mac App Store, although the quality of the apps aren’t as good overall as some of those found on the Mac App Store (such as Tweetbot, Pixelmator and the iLife and iWorks suites).

Now Microsoft isn’t the first to launch a successful digital store, I believe that Ubuntu Software Centre beat them and Apple to the punch, but it isn’t the only place for people to buy software. Much like on Mountain Lion people can still buy apps digitally elsewhere or on DVDs, although I believe Metro-style apps are available only on the Windows Store. The Windows Store is also regulated by Microsoft, much like how Apple regulates their app stores, to prevent the distribution of certain content (such as adult content) on their store.

VLC for Windows 8 (currently in development)

There is actually a version of VLC being developed for Windows 8 that looks pretty amazing with an interface similar to XBMC (a media centre app) with tiles and a neat, transparent heads-up display for the controls.

Although I have been impressed with Windows 8 I feel as though my disappointment with certain parts of it outweigh the good. At the very heart of Windows 8 you have two different user interfaces in which you use it – the classic desktop mode and the Metro-style mode.

These two modes can get a little confusing since there are different apps for each (there are 2 versions of Internet Explorer on Windows 8, a desktop and Metro-styel version) and these apps cause Windows to behave very differently depending on whether it’s in desktop or Metro-style mode.

When you launch a Metro-style app it takes up the whole screen and you aren’t really able to multi-task as you would on Windows 7, although there is the ability to snap in another app so you share part of the screen. If you launch a desktop mode app it will launch in the classic desktop mode where you can switch apps like you used to in Windows XP/7.

The way to switch between the two modes isn’t hard, you simply press the Windows key, but this is definitely something that will be a surprise to some who are used to the Windows key simply opening the Start menu (which coincidentally is missing from Windows 8, although there are rumours that Microsoft could bring it back in a future release or update).

There are also other problems with Windows 8 such as Windows starting in Metro-style mode (by default), new keyboard shortcuts and some of the multitouch gestures which aren’t as intuitive or natural as they are on iOS or Android devices.

What Microsoft should have done is taken notes on Apple’s approach by keeping their PC and mobile operating systems (OS) separate while converging them over time with certain features going from the mobile OS to the PC OS and vice versa.

I think this approach would have resulted in less confusion for users who have become accustomed to the Windows desktop since its introduction nearly two decades ago with Windows 95. This is contrary to the the development of the Mac OS which, although it did introduce a revolutionary new user interface with Mac OS X in 2001, simply innovated on the previous interface they had in Mac OS 8 and 9.

What Windows 8 will hopefully look like in a future update.

For me, it became apparent that non-tech people would have some difficulties with Windows 8 as soon as I saw locker gnome’s video on youtube where his father uses Windows 8 for the first time. I can only imagine how completely lost my own parents would be using Windows 8 and they’ve used Ubuntu, Windows XP/7 and even Mac OS X. My grandmother, who grew up in rural areas and on a farm, has never used a computer before, yet within seconds she was able to use my iPad with ease – this is the sort of user experience that Microsoft should strive for in their future products.

I recently got the chance to watch Disney’s latest hit animated film, Wreck It Ralph, which recently came out on DVD and Blu Ray, which is quite possibly the best Disney movie I’ve seen in years.

This film is a perfect example of a film that feels like it was created by Pixar – from the premise of video game characters coming alive like the toys in Toy Story right down to the animation style. You don’t have to go far to notice the subliminal message of this film – of change, hope and empowerment – that has been the hallmark of other Pixar films like Up or Wall E.

Wreck It Ralph tells the story of Ralph, the antagonist of the 8-bit video game Fix It Felix!, as he travels through the arcade to prove his self worth and gain respect from his peers.

The movie starts off with Ralph attending a therapy session with fellow bad guys called Bad-Anon. It is here that he announces his dissatisfaction with his life after doing the same job for 30 years – wrecking an apartment building – and that he doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore. After this session the villains all depart for home via Game Central Station, the central hub of the video game world. It is here that we get a glimpse of the lives of these video game characters.

Once the surprise of the announcement wore off I finally sat down and watched the announcement of Ubuntu for tablets. The announcement, hosted by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canoncial and the Ubuntu project – strikingly it looks a lot like an Apple commercial, with it’s minimalistic white background and focus on a single person – was a pretty impressive showing of what’s to come.

Side Stage in action on Ubuntu for tablets

According to Shuttleworth this version of Ubuntu will make use of multitouch gestures that make use of the screen’s edges to provide access to the tablet’s settings, notifications, app launcher, multitasking and app navigation controls.

• Swiping down from the top will provide you with the tablet’s settings, system services and notifications which provide you with the ability to reply in-line to messages on social networks or even dismiss them.
• Swiping from the right will display or hide apps you have set for multitasking on the tablet.
• Swiping from the left edge displays your favourite apps.
• Swiping from the bottom brings up navigation controls for the app, a sharing feature (from which you can share things to social networks) and access the HUD to search within the app using voice and even manage your active apps and their settings.

Multitasking on tablets works by launching an application and then snapping it into place on the right side of the screen. You can hide and show this app by swiping from the right edge.

Ubuntu is calling this feature Side Stage and although it currently supports running phone apps side by side with a tablet app it will eventually be able to run any apps side by side as long as Side Stage is built into the app.

Ubuntu’s Dash – the main hub for searching for stuff un Ubuntu – which has been continued to be improved in each new offering of Ubuntu has been included on the tablet providing users with an easy the way to search both locally and online for movies, TV shows, apps and everything you need while using a nice Cover Flow-like interface to scroll through the search results. The other neat thing is that unlike the options offered by Ubuntu’s competitors you don’t need to switch into another app to perform a search – you just active the Dash and search from there.

Ubuntu for tablets will also feature a secure multi-user mechanism so you can share your tablet with others and have them login with their own account or with a guest account. Although this is business as usual when you think about an OS on the desktop it is something that hasn’t seen widespread, perhaps even none, adoption by the competition.

Canonical has made the tablet and phone versions of Ubuntu available this past Thursday at their developer website. Although they are initially targeting the Google Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 7 and 10 tablets, Canonical is expecting to expand the OS to other devices as it partners with hardware manufacturers, although one enthusiastic Ubuntu user has been able to install Ubuntu on his Samsung Galaxy S3.

In terms of hardware specifications Canonical appears to be targeting devices that use an ARM CPU with screen resolutions ranging from 100 to 450 pixels per inch (for reference the iPhone 4S and 5 have a screen with 326 pixels per inch).

Another neat feature that Canonical has demoed is docking. According to Canonical if you dock a phone using Ubuntu with different peripherals the interface changes to match the attached peripheral(s). For example, if you dock the phone to a touch screen the interface scales properly to a tablet interface, throw in a keyboard and a mouse and it takes on the normal desktop interface of Ubuntu, throw in a remote and it becomes a media centre or game console. It’s expected that this docking feature will require at least a quad core ARM CPU or an Intel Atom with at least 1 GB of RAM to function properly.

The first native smartphone running Ubuntu is expected to be released at the earliest this coming Fall with tablets running Ubuntu coming next year.

If Canonical and Ubuntu developers can make this happen and this isn’t just a bunch of vapourware and it works as described then this could be one of the biggest innovations in the smartphone and tablet market since the original introduction of the iPhone and iPad.

This is the problem: You want to open a file using something other than the default application. You right-click its icon in the Finder, choose Open With, and a submenu pops up with an absurd number of duplicate entries…. But if, like me, you’ve been living with this problem for a while and don’t want to ever have to go searching for the solution again, here’s a little something you can add to your .bashrc:

• Open up the Terminal application (use Spotlight if you cannot find it)
• Type: 

  # Quick way to rebuild the Launch Services database and get rid
  # of duplicates in the Open With submenu.
  alias fixopenwith=’/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user’

• Press enter to save this alias and then enter: fixopenwith
• Once fixopenwith has been run you’re done. You can go the extra step by entering killall Finder but it might not be necessary (at least on Mountain Lion). 
• You can close the Terminal

I’ve noticed this issue for a while now and although it didn’t bug me enough to research a fix for it I am glad I came across a solution initially from TUAW and later at LeanCrew.COM via a post on Daring Fireball. The nice thing with this fix is that I now have an alias I can simply enter into Terminal to remove duplicates.

The Metro UI is inspired by the tile-like interface that Microsoft introduced for Windows Phone 7 a few years ago. This interface is very fresh and unique approach to user interfaces that doesn’t simply ape what Microsoft’s competitors are doing.

One application that really struck me as going in the right direction is the Metro version of Internet Explorer. Unlike previous versions this version of Internet Explorer is blazingly fast with improvements to the interface that don’t really bog down the browser and make it slow.

Some of the improvements that caught my eye were the placement of the address bar at the bottom of the browser, the behaviour of the address bar being set to auto hide when not in use and also thumbnails showing small previews of your open tabs.

This last one is pretty neat since I’ve tried browsers that natively support this or that support via add-ons and none of them seemed to load the thumbnails as fast as Internet Explorer.

Although I am sure this version of Internet Explorer is still a work-in-progress it surprised that it wasn’t easy to save an image I viewed in it. I tried using keyboard shortcuts, right clicking on the image and other things to try to save the image but each time I came up with no way to do it. In the end I launched the Classic version just so I can save this image.

I found this peculiar and ended up finding out that apparently this is normal behaviour in Metro and that you are unable to save files in the usual way. This seems a bit odd and I wonder if Microsoft will change this before Windows 8 is finally released.

The only other problems I’ve really had with Windows 8 are mainly having to use a MSN account as an initial login account (unlike on the Mac where I don’t necessarily need to use my Apple account), the limited selection of apps in the Windows Store (no official Skype or Twitter clients) and the biggest one is the presence of the Classic desktop interface.

I think Windows would have benefited from completely dropping the old desktop paradigm and making Windows 8 strictly a Metro-only OS, but I could see how that could alienate their users, especially developers who would have to re-do their programs to work with Metro.

At the end of the day it does still feel like Microsoft has moved four steps forward and two steps back with their work on Windows 8. Hopefully as development continues on Windows 8 there will be more steps forward and no steps back.

Resources: PC Magazine, Wikipedia

So since last September I have been working as a video game tester, first focusing on Level Design , Gameplay and Multiplayer testing and later a combination of several areas with a focus on artificial intelligence.

The experience has proven invaluable and I’ve had enjoyed contributing and working with some amazingly talented people in the video game industry, but at the same time I feel like I can no longer enjoy games as I did before. Now whenever I do play games on console or handhelds (like the Vita) I will always notice some of those same issues I would come across in my work as a tester, but the funny thing is how often I will come across one specific bug, the dreaded LOD pop (or level of detail pop).

For those unfamiliar with the term LOD pop it refers to the level of detail on some textures of objects (in a game) appearing to change as you move towards and away from the object, giving the effect as though it is popping, thus the name. I’ve come across this issue in all sorts of games ranging from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on the X-Box 360 to Valkyria Chronciles on the PS3 to even its sequel Valkyria Chronicles 2 on the PSP.

It sort of gets annoying after a while since I can’t help noticing the issue and thinking to myself how could the developers have not fixed this, how could they ship a game with such bugs present? Then I remind myself that at the end of the day they at least got the important bugs fixed.